Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Greasy paws and generators

This morning's adventure was changing the oil in the generator. This is the best I can do by way of a visual, folks.

Name, rank and serial number.

I'm making a point of finding the basic info on each of the major appliances. Yet to go are the refrigerator, the hot water heater, the furnace, the drinking water pump.

It was a messy morning. It started at Pep Boys, then to the storage lot, then to Lowe's (which, thank God, is 2 minutes from the storage lot) for a T30 Torx driver. This exotic critter was necessary to take the cover off the drain plug. The whole thing went really smoothly, except that I misjudged where to put the drain pan and doused me and a patch of dirt with warm oil. It also turns out that my new funnel is exactly the wrong shape to direct oil into the filler hole, so that was awkward.

But it's done. And I now know where the unit's 12VDC fuse (for control circuits) and the 120VAC circuit breaker are, AND I learned there's a "start" switch right on the unit, so I don't have to go inside to start it and turn it off. And I learned how to take the cover off so I can get at the guts of it without a partial disassembly like I've done before.

Oh -- I Do have another picture for you! Here!

That's the elapsed time meter for the generator. It cannot be reset, so I know that since 1999, the generator has been run for 451.6 hours. That's not a whole lot: One of the things I just learned is that the best thing to do for your generator's health is to run it for an hour under medium load once a week, regardless of whether you're using the RV. You change the oil every 100 hours or every year, whichever comes first.

I am indeed a bear of very little brain. It pleases me to know these things.

Here we go ...

This is about my travels in a 1999 24-foot class C motorhome, which I sometimes call "the Beast." It's also about projects, renovations, repairs, and plans which occur to me when I'm on the road.

There's a lot of these RV travel blogs out there. I've listed below some of the ones I read regularly. My intention is not so much to publish a travel magazine, but to record where I went and what I did and what I did to the rig and what I'd like to do. Something close to the original meaning of "log." Random thoughts on the general enterprise of RV travel will creep in.